Dan Albergotti

In the Era of the Sentence Fragment

Lines of incompletion. All those words that can be gathered. But not enough for shoring. Not against ruins. Fragments of sentences, of dreams, of the boys’ school in Hiroshima. Looking for raw material in the dust. Finding nothing. Having nothing inside. Unable to do the police in different voices. No more voices. No more makers, better or worse. Only weak echoes. And irony. And the dim blue sunrise of the television screen. And the wish finally to die, like Shelley, mid-sentence. Writing the triumph of life.

“In the Era of the Sentence Fragment” originally appeared inNew Orleans Review, 28.1, (summer 2002), and is reprinted from Charon’s Manifest (NC Writers’ Network, 2005).